TY - JOUR AU - Waldman,Michael AU - Nicholson,Sean AU - Adilov,Nodir TI - Positive and Negative Mental Health Consequences of Early Childhood Television Watching JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 17786 PY - 2012 Y2 - January 2012 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17786 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17786.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Michael Waldman Johnson Graduate School of Management 323 Sage Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853-6201 Tel: (607) 255-8631 Fax: (607) 254-4590 E-Mail: mw46@cornell.edu Sean Nicholson Professor Department of Policy Analysis and Management Cornell University 102 Martha Van Rensselaer Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Tel: 607/254-6498 Fax: 607/255-4071 E-Mail: sn243@cornell.edu Nodir Adilov Indiana University - Purdue University Neff Hall Fort Wayne, IN 46805 E-Mail: adilovn@ipfw.edu AB - An extensive literature in medicine investigates the health consequences of early childhood television watching. However, this literature does not address the issue of reverse causation, i.e., does early childhood television watching cause specific health outcomes or do children more likely to have these health outcomes watch more television? This paper uses a natural experiment to investigate the health consequences of early childhood television watching and so is not subject to questions concerning reverse causation. Specifically, we use repeated cross-sectional data from 1972 through 1992 on county-level mental retardation rates, county-level autism rates, and county-level children’s cable-television subscription rates to investigate how early childhood television watching affects the prevalence of mental retardation and autism. We find a strong negative correlation between average county-level cable subscription rates when a birth cohort is below three and subsequent mental retardation diagnosis rates, but a strong positive correlation between the same cable subscription rates and subsequent autism diagnosis rates. Our results thus suggest that early childhood television watching has important positive and negative health consequences. ER -